NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) said on Tuesday that it has created a new in-car computer that's powerful enough to enable fully self-driving vehicles. It'll begin shipping next year.
A new computer "brain" for fully self-driving vehicles
The chip giant unveiled the new system, called Drive PX Pegasus, at its GPU Technology Conference in Munich on Tuesday. When it begins shipping next year, the Pegasus will replace NVIDIA's current automotive "brain," the Drive PX 2 AI platform. Drive PX 2 is being used by many of the companies working on autonomous-vehicle systems, including automakers Volkswagen AG (NASDAQOTH: VLKAY), Mercedes-Benz parent Daimler AG (NASDAQOTH: DDAIF), and giant Toyota (NYSE: TM). It's also shipping in several production vehicles that come with advanced driver-assist technology.
NVIDIA's new Pegasus computing platform has the power needed to enable a fully self-driving vehicle, the company said. Image source: NVIDIA.
Simply put, Pegasus will be a huge upgrade from PX 2. It's capable of handling more than 320 trillion operations per second, making it 10 times more powerful than PX 2. That's enough, NVIDIA said, to power a full-blown "Level 5" self-driving vehicle, one that can operate under any conditions a human driver could.
On a technical level, the Pegasus is powered by four of NVIDIA's artificial-intelligence processors. It combines two Xavier system-on-a-chip processors with two graphical processing units (GPUs), along with hardware created specifically to accelerate deep-learning and machine-vision algorithms, the company said. The whole thing is packaged to meet the strictest auto-industry certifications for safety and durability. Best of all: Pegasus is small (about the size of a large book) -- a big leap from the trunkful of processors used in some self-driving development vehicles now.
NVIDIA pointed out that the computational power required for a fully self-driving vehicle is a huge leap from that offered in even the most advanced production vehicles today. Pegasus is the product it will offer to meet that need.
"Creating a fully self-driving car is one of society's most important endeavors -- and one of the most challenging to deliver," said CEO Jensen Huang in a statement."The breakthrough AI computing performance and efficiency of Pegasus is crucial for the industry to realize this vision."
NVIDIA will begin shipping the Drive PX Pegasus platform to its automotive partners in the second half of 2018.
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